Virginia Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice Blog

What Allstate's Not Telling You In their New Commercial

Many thanks to Canton, Ohio personal injury attorney Brian Wilson for bringing this new Allstate commercial to my attention. (I don't watch that much TV so haven't seen it in this area.)

Apparently, in an effort to influence and scare jurors, Allstate is running a commercial that supposedly shows an Allstate lawyer telling his client that, "sorry, the jury returned a verdict  in excess of your insurance coverage, you are going into bankruptcy."

This is meant to scare but its not true in most cases.

What Allstate is NOT telling you (and we have seen this happen in Virginia) is that it made a decision to gamble on the jury's verdict. IT likely turned down a reasonable settlement opportunity to settle the case within the policyholder's limits and IT never advised the insured of settlement negotiations.

This has been our experience in both suing Allstate insured's and in REPRESENTING Allstate insured's who come to us after being hit with an excess verdict.

In fact, in every case in which Allstate turned down a reasonable settlement demand but the jury then returned a verdict in excess of the insurance coverage, Allstate had paid the entire verdict. The insured never goes to bankruptcy and never loses their house.

I have blogged on this before and in every case in our experience, Allstate, having made the gamble, has paid. When Allstate really messes up the defense of the claim their insured does not go bankrupty. What happens is Allstate gets sued and Allstate ends up paying.